Introducing Y! Live

so firstly… live.yahoo.com! welcome to what i’ve been working on for the past 6 months!

Y! Live basically allows you to have your own internet TV channel, where you can also interact with your audience via real-time chat and being able to see them if they also have their camera on while watching you. the really cool part is that since this is web-based, you don’t have to install anything. (except for Flash, but i’m gonna go out on a limb and guess you already have that installed :])

we think that musicians will really dig this b/c it would allow them to perform live online whenever they want. the example i give when explaining it, is that a band could bring their laptop to practice in the garage and let the world watch. they could probably get alot more fans that way. (since you can also easily embed the video into your myspace page, for example.)

this was also my first launch at Yahoo! since starting in June. I joined the team right when this project was kicking off, so it has been really cool to see how it evolved over time. the plan now is to keep the site running full steam, and then start working on making it cooler. we have alot of plans for new features, but decided that getting it public sooner was better. we have a blog setup at yliveblog.com so if you do the RSS thing, feel free to subscribe b/c i’m sure any new features will be posted there. (we also have a twitter, but does anybody back home even know what twitter is?)

launch day was pretty crazy too. thursday started off interestingly, b/c we found out that my manager was in the ER all nite. we were all freaked out by that, and then he shows up to work with a broken arm! (long story, lol) but luckily we had the site ready to go and were just waiting on final approval from teams like Customer Care, Legal and Paranoids (security group). after some last minute tinkering to get them to sign off, we open the site up around 5pm. we popped open the champagne and beer and started using the site with the public.

the response was overwhelming! we got posted on some tech news sites, and digg. (at one point kevin rose’s channel was full of diggers) unfortunately we hit some “technical difficulties” and i spent from about midnight to 5AM trying to figure out what was misconfigured and how with my superhero coworker, premshree. we turned the site back on, played the inaugural game of ping-pong in our break room and then spent the rest of the morning watching the site. luckily i was able to sneak in a nap today from 9am-2pm! :]

all in all, i’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished in this short period of time (the site was made by 6 people, in 6 months) and i hope everybody at least tries it out once. :P

here are my channels. when you go, i may or may not be live.

http://live.yahoo.com/afex
http://live.yahoo.com/guitarzero

and of course, any feedback is welcome. ping me on facebook or leave a comment.